A Shipwright in Training

That’s about how things seem around here sometimes. I was reading in the living room the other night and outside came a huge noise… no, it wasn’t the 4th, but it might as well have been.

Out of the blue, fireworks down the street.

And not your average, “Hey, I’ve got some stuff from the fireworks guy” stuff, this was big time.

It’s not every day you get a full blown fireworks show outside your window. Turns out it was some sort of community celebration thingy that I would have known about had I read the paper. Personally, I’m glad it was a surprise.

A couple of weekends ago there were 2 major events in the area. The Wooden Boat Show came to Mystic this year (as it should every year… we’re the perfect venue for this show) and the Tall Ships came to Newport. On the same weekend. Dang.

Luckily, we really couldn’t work on Friday, what with all the folks milling about the boat shop and asking questions, so we were given the job of wandering around the boat show wearing our Mystic Seaport Staff shirts so that people could immediately recognize us as friendly and helpful. Ah, it’s a hard job, but we’re a hardy lot and we set to our task of wandering and looking with a will.

Everyone that came was shined and dressed in their Sunday best. The boats I mean. There were tons of vendors as well, but I didn’t take any photos for some reason.  Those folks standing in the photo above are watching the Wood Mizers glide through some logs. It was pretty sexy, let me tell you.

Everywhere you went there were beautiful wooden boats.

Just sitting quietly on the path there…

Or lined up on the waterfront. Cool mast on that 2nd boat from the left, eh?

The canoes and kayaks were particularly stunning.

This is a kayak from the guy who runs Guillimot. It’s just too sexy for words. Note the tiny pinstripe of maple on the deck that fades to nothing forward of the hatch. Good Lord. Every detail was like that. He’s really gone past being a builder and moved into boat artist territory.

And notice the way this canoe builder included a couple of stealers in his planking.

(stealers are the 3 planks that butt into one plank by the way)

There were these sweet, salty little boats

And then, there were the over the top luxury boats as well. Recognize this one? How about from this view:

Yep, that’s the shapely wooden (yes, wooden. Yes, painted black just to be in your face [note: dark colors show every flaw in wooden boat construction no matter how minor]) butt of Aphrodite. Rrrrroowww.

There was a family boat building tent that looked like barely controlled chaos all day long. Build a boat in a day!

I loved the details. Note the figured mahogany on the cabin top of Black Watch:

That detail is repeated on every bright finished piece on deck.

Phew. It was a long day of talking and admiring and more than a little lusting. Oh, and I bought a nifty little sharpening jig for sharpening your chisels using a side to side motion. Sorry, I can’t find a reference to it yet on Harrelson Stanley’s web site. He’s the fellow that designed it.

Then, it was off to Newport to sail around on Aurora and see some tall ships. My friends Lyons and Laura (along with their two excellent boys Eliot and Tommy) joined us for the ride.

We were also joined by Gina and her husband who came to do some video taping for project she’s working on. I’ll link to it when she puts it up on YouTube.

Again, boats boats boats. Pretty little boats sailing by…

And then the big boats…

Yep, that’s the crew lined up on the rigging.

Just sweet looking.

The crowds turned out in force to watch from the lawn of Castle Hill. Personally I was glad to be on the boat.

And then our engine died. We’d been motoring along due to the huge pack of boats all around us, and suddenly the engine started to hurk and jerk. Seems the fuel filter was clogged. So, we jumped to the sails, got everything up and set, and started sailing through the crowd of onlookers. James, our captain, did a fine job of getting everyone into place quickly, and most of the passengers didn’t even know there was a problem for quite a while.Sea Tow came alongside just in case, and we got the anchor ready, just in case.

We needed both.

One boat was anchored in front of us, and refused to raise anchor to let us sail by, so we had to quickly drop sail and drop our anchor to avoid crashing into him or tacking into the land. Idiot. At that point, Sea Tow lashed on to us and gave us a hip tow back to the dock.

And that’s why there aren’t more photos of the tall ships.Still, no one got hurt, the passengers jumped in and lent a hand when it came time to raise our anchor, and in short, it was a blast.

Not a bad weekend at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Mystic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.